CHICAGO – It may puzzle anyone who's closely followed the Big Ten expansion narrative why the conference would make a priority of Nebraska as a new member. Wasn't a prime objective to feed a large cable market to the Big Ten Network? Doesn't the only sizable city in Nebraska – Omaha – rate as merely the nation's 76th-ranked designated market area?

Well, yeah, that's all true. But Nebraska is a whopper of an anomaly to the model.

True, the state doesn't have a big market in it and not much of a concentration of cable households, either. But Nebraska's brand is so pervasive all over the country and especially throughout the Great Plains that it more than pulls its weight for viewership. It just does it in an old-school way.

Mark Silverman, the BTN president, put it this way when addressing just such a question here on Monday:

“I think adding a program of the scale and quality of a Nebraska does more to us than I think anyone can really put into a specific size of a specific market.”

What he meant was, Nebraska fans are all over. And they are fervent. They actually dominate a massive if somewhat sparsely populated region that stretches from Idaho through Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado in the intermountain West, across the Dakotas and western Minnesota and down through large chunks of Iowa, Kansas and Missouri.

View full sizeJOE HERMITT, The Patriot-News, 2003Penn State fullback Sean McHugh is brought down by Nebraska's Barrett Ruud in a 2003 game in Lincoln, Neb. The Nittany Lions have played the Cornhuskers 13 times, a number that's sure to rise after Nebraska joins the Big Ten next season.

That's because, for a long time, most of those states had no football program anywhere near as popular as the Cornhuskers. Some still don't. Add up all those fans and you have some serious numbers of TV viewers. You don't corral them in one pen. And the cable rights fees for all those places don't amount to great profits for the BTN.

But the game-to-game national ratings for Nebraska games rack up big numbers – routinely in the 3.0-to-4.5 range. In nine nationally televised games last season, Nebraska averaged a 3.57 rating. For comparison's sake, those figures are pretty similar to typical Penn State ratings. The Nebraska average is more than triple that of Rutgers' national average last season (1.51).

So, why would the Big Ten bother with Rutgers? For two reasons: 1. The massive size of the New York City metro market and possible cable rights fees should the area's major carrier (Cablevision) be brought on board on the basic tier. 2. A spec bet that Rutgers' ratings could be significantly bumped up with big-name Big Ten competition running through north Jersey on a regular basis.

None of that is any slam dunk. Neither is Rutgers' addition as a Big Ten member. BTN personnel I spoke to on Tuesday opined as much.

Conversely, Nebraska was a sure thing.

“Nebraska is as big ticket a football market nationally as there is,” summed Silverman. “And being able to show Nebraska football games on our network is going to greatly increase the relevance of the network and the distribution of the network nationally over time – like few other schools would, in my opinion.

“It's a much bigger additive element to the network than just adding a city that may have a couple hundred thousand more viewers.”

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